A BOY OF THE VILLAGE

An Tan

     An Tan was the nearest village to our base at Chu Lai. Now and then a junior officer would organize an afternoon liberty detail, and we'd round up whoever wasn't on duty, jump in a six‑by, and head for the ville. It wasn't that great, just a little Vietnamese town with hot dusty streets ‑ or muddy, during the monsoon season. But, except for five days of R&R which each of us got once during his 13‑month tour, this was about all we had to cut the drudgery of life in the compound, and the nights of sentry duty in our machine gun bunkers on the perimeter which alternated between sheer drudgery and moments of surreal terror.

     Word had come down: don't even think about trying anything with the women. The village mayor was unusually strict about prostitution, and for some reason, he'd been able to make it stick. But at least we could buy Cokes and "33" beer, though we were pretty leery of them because we'd heard rumors of VC putting broken glass in drinks sold to GI's. We'd stand around filtering Coke and beer through our teeth, hoping to catch any broken glass in our lips instead of our throats. Sometimes they even had ice.

     There was a spectrum of what we wanted when we visited a village that was, in a way, continuous. First, of course, we wanted to get laid. Since that couldn't happen in An Tan, we'd move down the list: something to drink besides warm, heavily chlorinated water; something to eat besides B‑ration chow; someone to talk to: human contact outside of You got midwatch in the bunker; You got DASC 0800 to noon.

     I met this kid on one of our trips into An Tan. His mother, who looked ancient but was probably in her thirties, had a little kiosk on the side of a dirt street where she had a piece of plastic stretched over bamboo poles for shade, and sold sodas and beer and mysteriously-wrapped things to eat that most of us never touched. I was standing in the shade swigging a beer when this little guy wandered over and looked up at me.

     The kid was a mess. One eye was radically crossed. He had open sores on his face and body that the flies wouldn't leave alone, and his hair, though cut short, was patchy like that of a dog with mange. His arms and legs were skinny, and his belly was beginning to show that swelling which comes with malnutrition.

     His mother introduced him to me proudly: "Ong," she said, pointing at him. Actually, the sound was a cross between "ong" and "om". "Hello, Ong," I said, and pointed to my chest. "Dean. My name...Dean." That was the extent of our verbal communication, except that I had learned Vietnamese numbers well enough to bargain with his mother and the other merchants. I found out later that Ong wasn't his name; it was Vietnamese for "man" or "male". His mother had been telling me - with pride - that her child, the one who had taken a liking to me, was a boy. So I spent those liberty afternoons walking around with this kid saying, "C'mon, Manchild," thinking I was calling him by name.

     That first time we met, he took some packet of food from his mother's little store of stuff and approached me with it and a questioning look. We were all accustomed to being inundated by pushy kids and had built up defenses against them. But this little guy was actually very shy, and I could tell he was hungry. I bought it for him. His mother seemed grateful.

     I had my guard up, twice: once against the hidden grenade or satchel charge which VC had been known to strap to children who would then walk into a group of GI's and detonate; once against forming an attachment that could only end in separation.

     The next time we went to An Tan I went over to Ong's mother's place and gave him and her some cans of C‑ration food I'd stuffed in my pockets. Like a lot of Americans, I would gather up cans of Ham and Lima Beans, or "Ham 'n' Slimeys," bartering or making points with the Vietnamese. In my four years of service I think I met only one American who would actually eat Ham 'n' Slimeys if he didn't absolutely have to. It was the thick layer of congealed grease that greeted you when you opened the can that revolted us. But they seemed popular with the Vietnamese, most of whom were so poor that meat in any form was a luxury.  

     After that, Ong would always know when our truck had come to the village and would run up to it and greet me and grab my hand and drag me back to his mother's stall. Then he began to take me through other streets in the village. At first I thought he was proud of the village, and was showing it off to me. And sometimes I thought that he was proud of me, and was showing me off to the people of the town.

     One afternoon he took me by the hand and led me away from the center of the village and down some narrow back streets where there were no GI's or even any businesses that catered to us. We got odd looks from people there; I wasn't sure if it was hostility or just surprise. I disengaged my left hand from Ong's and put his hand on the flap of the big cargo pocket on my left trouser leg so he could still feel like he was holding onto me. I swung my rifle around in front of me from where it had been hanging under my right arm by its sling, and cupped its forearm with my left hand. I felt safer now.

     So did Ong. I'd come to realize that the other kids in the village picked on him because of his odd eye and who knows what else, and that there were parts of An Tan where he never went, except when I was with him. I could sense a change in him, a hint of gloating, as we passed a group of tough‑looking boys who glowered at him as he passed with his personal Marine bodyguard.

     Word came down that An Tan would soon be put off limits for liberty. VC activity, or some such. Anyway, we would have one more visit. We were told that if we'd made any acquaintances there, this would be our last chance to say goodbye. I took in some extra food this time, and spent more money than usual at Ong's mother's stall. When the lieutenant herded us to the six‑by to head back to the base, Ong followed me. I knelt down and looked into his one good eye. How do you say goodbye to someone whose language you don't speak at all?

     I just said it the best I could, in English and with my hands: Goodbye, take care of yourself, I won't be seeing you anymore. I climbed over the tailgate as the truck took off.

     I looked back. The truck raised the usual thick cloud of red dust above the street. There was Ong in the dust, running after us. The truck got a slow start out of town because of its low gearing and because there were people in the way. Ong was able to keep up, staying close behind for a long time. We could see his face through the dust. He was crying, screaming, holding his arms up in the air as he ran, reaching for me, pleading for me to pick him up and take him with me. He'd understood goodbye.

BOYS TO MEN

                                    First Blood  

     As a kid I loved Indians. It started with some illustrated books in the school library. One book about the Iroquoi tribes became especially totemic for me. There were earth-toned renderings of the insides of longhouses, with sleeping platforms of poles lashed together with sinew and piled with robes of animal skins, with the space and the dusky‑skinned people and the implements of their lives ‑ the beaded moccasins, the deerskin leggings, the obsidian knives, the stout bows and hide quivers of feathered arrows ‑ lit only, but magically, by firelight. I began to live in a fantasy world. I wanted to wear those skins, carry those weapons, live in a space as richly textured, as warm, as right as the interiors of those longhouses. I wanted to be one of those people.

     I saved the cardboard cards out of Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the ones that separated the layers of biscuits. Each card had instructions from the comic-book character Straight Arrow on how to make some kind of Indian artifact: how to lash on a flint arrowhead, or how to carve a spearhead out of wood and harden it in fire.

     I made my own bow out of a seasoned branch and some heavy string, and it worked pretty well. Arrows were a different matter. I searched every tree in my life ‑ there weren't many, there in the project - but couldn't come up with a single stick straight enough to fly at all true.

     I saved my allowance and collected pop and beer bottles till finally I could afford a store‑bought arrow. I shot and shot. I got to where I could hit with some regularity a pretty small target, if it wasn't too far away.

     One day I took my bow and arrow outside and started for the end of our building, to shoot in the sagebrush out along the railroad tracks. I saw a robin hopping on the grass in our yard. It was hopping away from me with its head down, absorbed with whatever it was trying to catch to eat. I stalked it from behind. It never saw me. I got close enough, aimed, let fly. The robin screamed, a sound I had never heard a robin make, and ran clumsily along the grass, dragging the arrow which had entered its ass, right under the tail. It screamed and ran, wobbling desperately until the arrow dropped out on the grass. The robin hopped and finally flew weakly out of sight. My heart pounded; I felt blood pulsing in my throat and head. I didn't understand what had happened. I didn't understand why I had shot at the robin ‑ people didn't eat robins ‑ or why I had hit it, or why it didn't die, or what I would have done if it had died.

                                    Rogue River 1

     I was eleven or twelve. Mom and Darrell and I were sitting on the bank of the Rogue River, downstream from Grants Pass, Oregon. We'd moved there after she and Lloyd split up and she couldn't find work. We were at a place on the river where rapids crashed over high rocks and fell into a deep pool, the stream of green water with white wave‑crests flowing swiftly through the pool near our side, with a slower eddy arcing out into the shallower water on the far side.

     I knew Mom was afraid of water. She'd nearly drowned once as a girl. You couldn't get her in a boat, and the few times I ever saw her swim you could see the fear in her, in her frantic breaststroke that was little more than dogpaddling, caring only that she kept her head as far out of the water as possible.

     I'd been studying the rapids, the pool, the eddy on the far side. It looked exciting. Sure, it was swift. But speed by itself wouldn't hurt you, unless you hit a rock. The pool was deep, with no rocks except at the far end. In water that swift, you'd sure go a lot farther downstream than across. But the pool was long; there was room for that. If you swam fast enough to just cross that swift part before you got to the end of the pool, the current should drop you nice and gentle in that eddy on the far side. It would be a hell of a ride.

     I remember Mom's exact words, and she said them with the gravity brought on by the fact that she had obviously been remembering her childhood terror in the water: "If a feller was to fall in there, he'd never get out alive."

     The words were just out of her mouth when I lengthened my skinny body, not pausing to stand, extending the squat all the way into the dive, taking a good deep breath during the arc of my dive, hitting the green‑and‑white riffle right at the swift part and feeling it jerk me sideways, not even trying to surface at first, letting the momentum of the dive carry me, deliciously, both across the swift green current and downstream with it. A couple of strokes under water popped me to the roiling surface. I didn’t bother to breathe at first because the waves were breaking over my head. Finally, making the strongest strokes I could manage in a current that carried me much faster downstream than I could swim across, I snatched a breath between immersions. I took one long breath's worth of hard strokes across the current, letting it do what it wanted with me till I broke through the swiftest part, got another breath, and swam out to the far side where the current slowed and curled and dropped me in the eddy the way one of those little autumn whirlwinds will pick up a maple leaf and twirl it a couple of times over the lawn and drop it on your porch.

     Yup. A fine ride. I looked over at Mom, sitting motionless on the rock above the pool. I'd come a long way downstream, as I'd figured. But not too far; there was still some water between me and the rocks. It took quite awhile for me to go downstream to the shallows and wade across and work my way back up to her. She'd had time to compose herself by then. She didn't yell at me or anything. She'd been too scared. But I could still see the fear and hurt and anger all mixed together in her face.

Dress Blues 1

     Bill took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30‑30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30‑30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30‑06, and later, the M-1 Garand. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere.

     We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me.

     The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by ‑ of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town ‑ an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals ‑ some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth ‑ on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers.

     The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform.

     The man in the uniform was watching me ‑ with approval, it seemed ‑ handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world.         

     I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in.

     "No," I said.

     The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked, and the feeling he brought into the room. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that."

     The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained.

     I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.

     "Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval.

     I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are.

     As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.

     I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.

                                                   Almost a Cowboy

     Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank got Darrell and me hired on for the hay harvest at the Wellman ranch on the Powder River near Baker, Oregon. Bessie and Lank had lived in Baker since they'd come west from Missouri in 1940, except for a brief return in the 1960’s. Stan Wellman was Lank's hunting partner and all‑around sidekick. Stan's father, Les, owned the ranch; Stan was the foreman. Les, still vigorous, was over seventy.

     Most of the work was done with tractors, but Les had kept his horse‑drawn sickle‑blade mowers and dumprakes. At a time when most ranchers had acquired baling machines, he still stacked his hay loose. The process of getting it from standing hay to stacked hay had several steps. First it was mowed, mostly by mowers attached to his big John Deere diesel tractor or one of the two or three others he had around ‑ I remember a Massey‑Ferguson, an Allis Chalmers and maybe a small Case. But sometimes ‑ partly just to show off, Stan said ‑ Les would hitch a single horse to an old steel‑wheeled mower he had and clean up along fences or along the willows by the riverbank where it was dangerous to drive a tractor. Claimed he had more control with the horse‑drawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good.

     After a field was mowed, the fresh‑cut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel‑curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelve‑foot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twenty‑year lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two‑and‑a‑half‑foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again.

     Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done.

     Darrell and I had hired on at three dollars a day, plus meals at the harvest table and cots in the bunkhouse. We'd start our day before dawn, walking to the pasture in the dark while it was still soaked with dew to catch the horses and get the halters on them and lead them into the barn and buckle on their collars. Then while they were chewing their grain we'd step up to the post where each horse's harness hung on a long peg, and slip the rump end of the harness up onto our shoulders like Les had taught us, sliding each new strap down until the entire harness was arranged along the arm. Then we'd reach up and grab one of the hames in each hand and walk over to the horse and throw the whole business out along the horse's spine with a motion like coastal fishermen use to cast their nets. Next, it was step back alongside the horse and distribute the straps along his back until the rump strap dropped in place. Then grab his tail and free it from that strap ‑ the one that took the pressure when you backed up the rig ‑ so the horse could use his tail against the flies. Then go back to his neck and slip the hames into the grooves in the collar, making sure they were seated, and buckle them together in front of the horse's chest. Then there were just a couple of straps to buckle loosely under the belly. The bridles would go on after breakfast, when we were ready to back them to the rig and hitch the doubletree to the horses' collars, and the tugs to the dumprake.

     But first we'd go to the house where Les' wife would feed the crew a huge breakfast which we'd finish in time to hitch up and start the tractors and be headed out through the gate as the first light slanted across the fields.

     Les Wellman lost no time getting his three dollars a day's worth of work out of us. The first morning, he showed us how to catch and harness the horses, drove to the field with us and showed us how to operate the dump‑rake, and turned us loose. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven, getting to drive real horses like that, doing real ranch work, just like we'd heard about from the grown men and seen in movies.

     The romance was quickly tempered, at least for me. Returning from the field the first evening, feeling sunburnt and exhausted and hungry and thirsty and full of myself, I was driving along the edge of a field next to a barbed‑wire fence when a horsefly ‑ an attack bomber of an insect ‑ spooked my team, and they bolted into a full runaway, with me bouncing on the steel tractor seat and holding onto the reins for my very life. The world spun and jounced and became a huffing clanking juggernaut on which I was stuck like a confused flea, which could destroy me equally easily if I stayed perched on the tractor seat or if I tried to get off it. I remembered the old hands' stories of what a man looked like if he fell under a runaway dump rake and got perforated by a dozen or so of the giant steel teeth and then dragged over rough ground. I decided to try to stay on the tractor seat, using my hold on the reins to stay upright. I heaved my hundred ten pounds against the ton and more of galloping horseflesh, trying to make my desperate whoas heard above the roar of hooves and horsebreath and machine.

     I'd just about gotten them slowed into a manageable run, when the rig hit something and the tongue broke between them, and they spooked again.

     Somehow the rake's teeth stayed locked up in the traveling position, and somehow I stayed in the seat. But it was a long ride. Every time Pete and Bill started to settle down and began responding to my desperate pulls on the four heavy leather reins, the broken point of the tongue would stick in the ground and break off and cause the rig to lurch violently and they'd spook again. Finally there was no more tongue to break off, and they ripped the tugs loose from the rake and took off and the universe was suddenly still as I sat looking at the strands of the barbed‑wire fence in front of my nose.

     Les Wellman came driving up on the "Johnny popper," which was what we called the John Deere because of the noise its diesel engine made. He throttled it down and looked me over. By the time he spoke, Stan and some of the others had come up as well. Les actually had a hell of a sense of humor, but you'd never know it until you'd been around him awhile. His way with a joke was to get other people to laugh till their sides hurt without ever cracking a smile himself. So, did he ask if I was alright? Nah. What he said was, "Well, don't just sit there, boy. Go catch yer horses.”

One day when the harvest was nearly over, Mom came out to the ranch to visit Darrell and me. We showed her around, trying our best to act like old hands. We'd walked her out to the pasture to introduce her to the horses, and were back in the barn showing her the harness and other tack and how we did this and how we did that. There was a steel‑grey horse in a box stall at the end of the barn. We knew little about it, except that it was a stud colt. He was as big as a good‑sized saddle horse, because he came from larger draft stock, like Pete and Bill. But they were gelded, and the colt wasn't, which explained why he was so full of beans.

     Les came into the barn and went to the colt's box stall. We walked over and introduced Mom to him. The colt was loose in the stall, which was large enough for him to be range around and bump the sides and stamp, even rearing back on his hind legs and pawing the air like Roy Rogers had his horse Trigger do in the movies. Pure male, pure power. Les spoke to me, all business: "Dean, take this halter and get in there and put it on that horse and tie him up to that ring in the corner post, while I go get my farrier's tools. I got to work on his hooves." He turned and left the barn.

     I quartered an apple with my pocket knife and took the halter and stepped between the rails of the stall. The horse reared back on his haunches and pawed the air and stamped the ground and laid his ears back and whinnied loud. "Son, are you sure...?" Mom sounded worried. But sons, of course, delight in worrying their moms, and in going ahead with what worries them even when the sons themselves realize that what they're doing is stupid. Besides, I couldn't back down from something Les had told me to do. "It's all right, Mom," I said, expressing more confidence than I felt.

     I moved slowly. "Hoa," I said in as steady a voice as I could muster, wishing my voice would hurry up and change so I could make that deep, calming, almost crooning sound the older men made when they walked up to a horse. "Hoa, boy." I kept talking, slow and easy. I don't know if it was the apples or my voice, but he settled down some. He let me approach, feed him one slice and stroke his nose ‑ "Slo-ow now, easy, easy, fella" ‑ and his neck and shoulder. I raised the halter and got my arm around his neck. He threw his head, lifting me off the ground like some toy human. I talked him down again and gave him another piece of apple and used another to back him into a corner of the stall with me at his head and fed him the last of the apple and while he was chewing it I slipped the halter over his nose and up over his ears and reached under his throat and buckled it. All the while he fidgeted, knocking me about with his head. I turned him around and walked over and got one end of the rope through the snubbing ring in the corner, then used its mechanical advantage to take up whatever slack I could every time he moved his head. Now when he threw his head the rope jerked hard against the steel ring, and the halter strap cut into the back of his neck. He'd let off, and I'd gain some rope. We repeated that dance until I had him snubbed up in the corner with two half hitches.            

     I was stepping out between the slats of the stall, carefully out of range of the colt's rear hooves, when Les came back into the barn carrying his rasp and nippers. He leaned over the top rail and looked at how the colt was tied in the corner.

     He actually showed surprise. "Goddamn, boy. Don't you know that horse ain't even broke?" His little joke, which I hadn't gotten at the time, was supposed to have been that I would get in the stall, and the colt would rear and snort and terrify me into climbing back out in a hurry. I guess he'd forgotten what a boy will do when a man has challenged him, or when his mother is watching.

Darrell and I had never worked so hard in our young lives, but we hated to see the haying season end. A few days before we finished, Les had put me up on the Johnny Popper - the one with the hand clutch that you leaned way forward with a dramatic motion to engage ‑ and turned me loose bucking the hay that Darrell and I had bunched with the dump rakes. Was I something!

     Then the hay was all up, and Darrell and I had to get our stuff from the bunkhouse and put it in the old blue Studebaker. Les came around and asked if I wanted to ride fence for a while on some pasture land he had out on the Virtue Flats sagebrush country on the other side of Baker.

     Was he kidding? Ride fence? On a horse? A saddle horse?! Mom! Please, Mom! M-A-A-A-M! I must have sounded like a scared lamb.

     It wasn't to be. It was late August; she had to be back to work in Klamath Falls, and Darrell and I had to start school. We left Baker, unhappy to go but thrilled at what we'd done that summer. Wait'll we told the other kids some of the stuff we'd heard in that bunkhouse. I still remember one verse the older boys sang to the tune of "The Old Chisolm Trail":

                   Last time I seen 'er,

                   ain't seen 'er since,

                   she was jackin' off a nigger

                   through a bob‑wire fence,

                   gonna tie my pecker to a tree, to a tree,

                   gonna tie my pecker to a tree.

     We stopped at a gas station to fill up for the drive home. Mom asked me to pay for the gas. Huh? I said. Darrell and I were rolling in dough: three dollars apiece for every day of the haying season – about eighteen days - and we'd had no time to spend any of it. We'd never had close to that much money in our lives.

     "Son, that's all the money we have," she said. In fact, she needed for both of us to give her all we'd earned, until she got us back home and got back to work herself. She was sorry, but that was just the only way.

     We gave her all our money. We knew she was sorry, and that she wouldn't lie to us and just take our money for herself. She said she'd try to save us a little spending money out of it.